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New York Times: October 11, 1995
JEWELRY DESIGNER KILLS HUSBAND
By Gabriel McCail
Grace Leshansky Boudreau, the jewelry designer known professionally as Grace L, shot and killed her husband Paul, Manhattan prosecutors say, in the Hudson Street loft, which until last month the couple had shared. Mr. Boudreau was a financial advisor and writer.
Police arrived on the scene at 1: 30 A.M. Tuesday in response to a phone call from Grace Boudreau. At a brief press conference, NYPD Lieutenant John Classon, in charge of the case, described Ms. Boudreau as sounding calm on the phone.
When the officers arrived, Classon said, they found Ms. Boudreau sitting on the couch staring at the victim who was lying on his back on the floor maybe thirty feet in front of her. There had been a single shot, the bullet fired from about fifteen feet. No sign of a struggle.
"The victim would have died in minutes," Classon said. "The bullet hit an inch under the heart. It was either a skillful shot or, as his wife claims, 'dumb luck.'" Classon identified the weapon as a Sig Sauer .38 caliber revolver, which Ms. Boudreau claimed to have seen for the first time that night when her husband pulled it out of his coat pocket. According to Classon, police investigation shows no weapon registered to either Boudreau. He said, "Ms. Boudreau has admitted to the shooting and is in custody."
Specific circumstances surrounding the shooting are unclear, but the Boudreaus separated two weeks ago, according to friends, after an incident at the Soho art gallery opening. Other guests at the Huffman Gallery report that Grace Boudreau attacked her husband, knocking him against a large canvas on exhibit, allegedly damaging the painting and the one hanging beside it. The following day, he moved from the couple's loft to the Chelsea Hotel. He was still registered there when he died. The same day, Ms. Boudreau filed for a court order of protection to bar her "abusive" husband from entering the loft or otherwise coming within fifty feet of her. The order had not yet been issued.
Sources close to the couple called the two-year marriage, "always intense," and said that it had been "stretched to the snap point" by a series of misfortunes beginning about seven months ago with the disappearance of Ms. Boudreau's father under mysterious circumstances, and peaking with sudden, dramatic reverses in her business. The six-year-old Grace L Company produces Ms. Boudreau's striking jewelry designs, often combining precious metals with unlikely materials such as driftwood, bottle glass or industrial nails. The enterprise had been from its inception a great success but recent over-leveraging, over-commitment and late deliveries put the company in jeopardy, according to business associates. On July 16, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
Grace Boudreau's father, George Leshansky, an accountant said to be a habitual gambler, disappeared last March. The story received intense media coverage at the time, most of it speculative. It was rumored that Leshansky had been slated to testify in the FBI's case against Josh Pyatt, alleged boss of a Harlem-based mob involved in loan-sharking, protection and other forms of racketeering. The FBI declined comment. To date, neither Leshansky nor his body has been found. He is presumed dead. Initial suspicion focused heavily on the Pyatt family, specifically on Josh's son, Michael, but no charges were brought.
Four days before his death, Paul Boudreau had turned 32. Grace Boudreau is 33.
Chapter 1
October 3, 2002
I'd been charged with murder. The lawyers had pleaded it down to manslaughter. Manslaughter. The slaughter of a man: the bloody sound of it had seemed to me worse than murder, and still does.
They'd pronounced me lucky, my lawyers had: lucky that it had been Paul's gun; lucky I'd put in for the court order of protection against him even if it hadn't had time to come through; lucky that everyone knew about my monumental losses - my father, my business; lucky I had behaved erratically in public. All of this supported the claim that the killing was unpremeditated. After all, I hadn't gone out and bought a gun, but simply been swept away, provoked in my vulnerable state into the impulse to use a weapon ready at hand - Paul's weapon.
Premeditated. Swept away. Provoked. Vulnerable. Impulse: the terms with their self-important airs marched, heads high, masquerading as hard facts. Like little soldiers they'd protected my flanks. Oh yes, one lucky lady, that's me. But of course I was: five to twelve, out in seven, as opposed to, say, seven to fifteen, six to eighteen - life. That could be seen as luck.
Here I stood now in a changing room for just-released prisoners, peering at myself full-length: charcoal pants, black turtleneck sweater, shiny black shoes with small silver buckles and, unseen in the mirror but a definite presence, silken underwear - every item expensive; every item brand new. I was unused to looking into mirrors and the experience jarred. It seemed like the reflection had dimension, life, was ready to walk away, while I was flat and without substance, a figment of my own imagination.
I'm half an inch shy of six feet. My build used to be generous like an Olympic swimmer's, skin taut over a layer of insulating flesh. But seven years in prison lost me the habit of eating much, developed the habit of exercise, lots of it, which had leaned my body out. The eyes that looked back at me were still my eyes: the color of Russian amber, yellow flecked with dark bits - tiny prehistoric fossils maybe. They are set wide, shaped by the high cheekbones beneath them into crescent moons, suggesting a smile no matter what. My nose is straight and emphatic; the chin, though small, has a jut to it, and my long, mobile mouth belongs on a comedian. The features were there, intact, but my face had changed anyway: it reminded me of a slum store shuttered for the night.
And then there was my hair. During the first two years up here in Bedford Hills, its Indian black began a leaching to white - all but a wide, off-center skunk streak that held stubbornly onto darkness. The hair hung in a fat braid to my waist. Funny, I'd always wondered whether there was Indian blood in me - hoped there was.
I glanced down at the stylish, witchy points on my shoes. The new leather felt stiff on toes used to spreading themselves in sneakers. Sheilah Donlan had arrived here early this morning her arms filled with tissue-plumped Bergdorf shopping bags. Sheilah and I went back as far third grade together - the only person on the outside I knew anymore. For the past half an hour she'd been bustling around me like a mother dressing her child for the first day at a new school, handing over the outfit piece by piece, talking up the provenance of each item, its particular claim to wonderfulness. Sheilah's mirror reflection stood behind mine, holding out a hand now, offering "A little blush?"
I turned to the actual Sheilah and said, "I don't know a fancier way to say thanks, but if I did I would." Sheilah said, "I'm your friend. It's what friends do. You'd do it for me. You've done it for me." True, I'd seen Sheilah through a booze and pills crack-up, checked her into Four Winds Hospital not so many miles from here, collected her two months later, clean and sober. But that was then. Now I seriously doubted whether I had the emotional horsepower to fuel the complicated demands of a civilian friendship, particularly one with Sheilah who gives too much and wants too much back.
I thought of Toukie and Wanda and Mercedes, lifelines during the years that are about to become the past - friendships rooted in impermanence, stripped of demands, vigorous maybe for just those reasons. Chiefly, I pictured Toukie's smart black eyes and the gold tooth that twinkles when she laughs. We'd had a special bond: two women who had killed their men.
"Thanks, Sheil. I'll just leave it at thanks for now," I said taking the blush compact and brush, turning back to the mirror to apply it. The luxurious fabrics felt illicit against my skin as I moved, taunting in a way that I thought for a moment might make me cry. Actually, I'd love to cry. A big, long jag of wet sobs would be as satisfying as… a comparison doesn't spring to mind immediately, then it does: as satisfying as a good come. The homecoming queen, Paul used to call me. But that was then, too.
In these seven years I had schooled the riskier emotions with a hard hand, dressage discipline of dangerously frisky horses - something like that. I could laugh within bounds but produce not a tear; rushes of anger sparked and quickly fizzled like wet firecrackers: mad, sad, glad - all three were there but powerless. Sex? The ex-homecoming queen's urges were frozen or dried to dust - one way or another, so out of commission that going gay for the stay, as they put it up here, had not been even vaguely tempting.
Yet… Yet, as I stood before that mirror, Sheilah watching expectantly, my insides asked for the buzz of strong feeling, the kind that bucks in the gut, races the pulses. A first day of freedom should be marked, shouldn't it, if only to prove you're alive? But no luck. I could tap no feeling other than the craving for feeling, a feeling in the second degree. Maybe this was how it would be now: a life in the second degree to pay for a death in the second degree. Laid on the line that way, it seemed only fair.
"Do you feel remorse?" they had asked. I'd said, "Yes," knowing it was the answer they - the judge, the police, the psychiatrist, the parole board - needed. The parole board didn't buy it at the first hearing, the five-year mark; they almost never did, I'd been warned, in a case like this. They'd hit me for two more years. At the second hearing the same simple "yes" rang truer to them.
Did it ring true to me? Does it now? Well, it was true that at the crack of the shot, the kick of the gun in my hand, Paul's body jerking back, I had hollered "No." I remembered clearly my finger tightening on the trigger, knowing that it was; the terrific jolt to my own body - then, his slow wilting collapse, the sounds from him, except for the very last one, drowned out by my scream. I remembered also the preceding hour, every bit of it, every word, every move, though I said I did not.
"Yes:" a clear answer to their clear questions. But how could I seriously claim remorse when I knew that given the final moments to relive exactly as they'd gone, I might do exactly what I'd done?
"You feeling bad?" Sheilah asked moving toward me. "You look a little shaky."
"No," I lied, fooling neither of us. "No, I'm good - just ready to get the hell out of here."
###
"The owner's a dancer on tour with some Andrew Lloyd Webber show," Sheilah said. It was maybe half an hour later and we were driving down the Hutch, The Bedford Hills Women's Correctional Facility a good five miles behind us. "Look, don't expect anything grand. It's kind of a skinny building scrunched in between two better ones - no doorman, but you said you didn't care. I signed a nine-month lease for you. That's when he'll be back."
"Sounds perfect." I said, trying to be positive despite a sense of dread beginning to rise like a fog around my heart. So this was freedom: a vast, shapeless space said to be filled with possibilities - but I could see only pieces of possibilities and even those felt beyond my reach.
"Ninety-third Street, you said, Sheil?"
"Ninety-fourth, just east of Amsterdam, remember?"
"Oh, right, you told me that. And I do care about the doorman. I'm God damned relieved there isn't one. I've had enough hall monitors to last me awhile."
"Ah, Sweets. It's going to take you time to get over this." Like a cold or a car accident or a divorce. After years spent thickening my skin, I found myself suddenly skinless, too ready to be chafed by a brush against anything, even a friend's sympathy.
"How much money do I have left from the loft sale and all?" I asked. "I know you told me that, too, but…"
"God, for someone who's made a lot of it, you're really hopeless about money."
Paul: "Back in Century One B.C. some smart Roman said, 'Money alone sets all the world in motion.' Ergo, the one who runs the money spins the earth... I'm pretty good at it."
Grace: "I'm not. I seem to know how to make it and how to save it. Want to feed my nest egg some growth hormones? Just tell me where to sign."
Paul: "Hmm. Let me think about that. You're my wife, may be a bad idea."
Paul had been nothing if not subtle. No rush… I reminded myself that replays like this one were hot coals, to be handled with tongs - imagery picked up in the stress management therapy group, Tuesdays and Thursdays at four.
"Hopeless about sums it up," I said, back with Sheilah. "So what's the bad news?"
Her nose wrinkled with the arithmetic of my finances. "After brokers, lawyers and all, just over twenty-three thousand, except for the paintings and sculptures you wanted to keep." Just a few of the many I'd owned - mostly by artists who'd been friends of mine.
"I'd have to be flat out broke to sell those, not that they'd be worth all that much in the world of dealers and collectors."
"Probably not. But look, you're not flat out. You'll have the salary from me, at least for the short range."
We'd known each other at close range for thirty years - long enough for us both to recognize it would be no walk on the beach, me working for her. But we both recognized also that for a paroled convict a solid job in waiting was worth almost any walk required, plus a kiss on the ground beneath her feet.
"I still suspect you didn't exactly need another mouth to feed," I said. "I really will try to be useful. Hey, thanks to you I am - in discharge manual lingo - an employed woman with a domicile and bank account - a good bet to re-enter society as a responsible citizen."
"Bet your ass you are! And I didn't invent the job. Swear. I've taken on another recruiter and a full-time research guy - who's fabulous, by the way, and I pay him a fortune. I admit it's scary, the extra expense, but I had to do it. The search business is way more complicated than it was - much more work, and thank God the work's coming to me. Used to be that our mandate was finding and wooing the best candidates. Now we practically have to do an FBI check to make sure they've been good boys and girls as well as good executives. Not all
of them have, which means more recruits, more meetings. So I'm there some nights till ten, phoning and emailing my little heart out. What I'm saying is I need to be nicer to myself. I mean what's the good of making it if all you get is the chance to work harder?"
"Right." A shrink's question and Sheilah, always the student with her hand raised highest, had the right answer. But the answer in her case came with a footnote: her fingers would never really come off those details, not if she had a dozen schedulers. "Email," I said, "you'll have to teach me that. The Internet got big just about the time I went in. We weren't allowed to mouse around in cyberspace up there."
"You'll learn it in half a second. But look, you know and I know this isn't the kind of work you're used to, or ought to be doing in the long run." No use in recapping what I was currently used to, or in pointing out that the long run was territory as remote to me as the afterlife. "By the time the dancer gets back and wants his apartment, Gracie, you'll be…"
Sheilah kept talking but I didn't hear the rest. My thoughts had cut and run down a private path after "Gracie." She called me that only occasionally, a kind of reminder of how long we went back together. With George gone, she was the only one who did. I'd been Gracie; he'd been George, never been Dad or Daddy. He was George from the time I could talk. It suited the way we were with each other. Now say Jawge. Atta girl. I could hear his charred voice, with its Noo Yawk dips and swells. And you're Gracie. Gray-see. What else would a Jawge name his girl?
Especially this George: when I saw George Burns on television re-runs and later in the movies, the fox-faced, dapper look, as well as the hoarse vaudeville sound of him, were uncannily like my father - well, like George Leshansky might have been, given the luck and swagger to be a winner.
Burns and Allen were our household mascots, a scratchy record of their stage and radio skits on the priority list of stuff that came along each time we moved: George, the faintly gruff, exasperated but protective leader; Gracie, the adorably child-voiced dumb-bell always trumping his ace, far wiser in her innocence than he. I said mascots, not models - I was no more adorable than George was protective, and wisdom was scarce in our household.
How to explain about George and me… We were a team, just us two. Originally, there must have been a third team member, but she was gone before my memories began. George never mentioned her, and during my earliest years there seemed nothing strange about that. By the time my curiosity began to put out shoots, George's elusiveness about anything to do with family ties was normal too. Asking became a kind of half-hearted game
"So who was my mom? Come on George, did she run away or die or what?"
"Who do you want her to be?"
"A Indian warrior princess."
"You got it, kid."
"No, tell me, really."
"A seven-foot Indian warrior princess with very long legs. That's how come she could run so fast and not trip on her bow and arrows. Look, I'm going out for a coupla hours. You be okay?"
"Sure. Bring back ice cream. Chocolate."
"Say goodnight, Gracie."
I can tell you what my first retrievable memory is:
I am sitting in a corner of an unfamiliar room, one eye shut, the other pressed against the peephole of a kaleidoscope, fixed on the stained glass patterns inside that change at the slightest move of my hand, loving the look of them, frustrated that I can't save the ones I like best, keep them forever, because if I could, I would be safe - safe from what I don't really know; I have no recollection of feeling scared. At a table in the center of the room, men are smoking and dealing out cards, slap, slap, slap. They give and take red, white and blue discs from each other; that makes a louder sound. They don't talk much, except to repeat words like "raise" and "call." From time to time some of them look really mad at each other or like their stomachs hurt bad. One of them is George. My age would be five - that's my best guess.
When I recall that little girl I begin to feel sorry for her, and then I bring myself up short and stop it. George was a singleton in his heart, a gambler in his blood and bone, a man unsuited in his nature to be a parent, yet his daughter never went cold or hungry or threadbare, nor was she abandoned or afraid she might be - never hit, never threatened, never made to feel boring or burdensome.
Quite the contrary, my father tended to me (for if not, who did change those diapers, fill those bottles with milk?) until I was old enough to begin some tending of him. And how heady is that: to be necessary when you're too young to have earned anyone's confidence, too young to deserve such importance! I was cherished, if not in the orthodox way a parent cherishes a child, then in another way. George depended on me, and I depended on that. You could say ours was a house of cards in more ways than one, a house where laughs and music punctuated the states of emergency - or the other way around. Nevertheless, it was ours…
A tap at my shoulder: Sheilah's forefinger, insistent in its touch. As I turned, I saw the gleam of gold and copper, a ring I'd made her fifteen years ago. "Earth to Gracie. This is too much stuff for you, right? I'm overloading you with information. Here's the thing, though: You'll live in that little apartment for now and you'll work for me, but in what - a few months? - you'll be designing again, and then..."
"No, I won't," I cut in. She had touched a nerve and the pain was sharp.
"You won't? But that's crazy. You design jewelry, that's what you do, who you are. How you make your living. Since we were kids it's always been…"
"Look, I said won't; I mean can't. My hands are not steady, okay? Satisfied now?" It came out like the sudden snarl of an animal stroked the wrong way. "Christ, I'm sorry," I said. I looked at her hurt face and remembered that she'd gone through her own hell and bounced back. The animal I felt like was a swine. "Sorry, really," I said. "Give me half a minute to catch my breath, Sheil."
"Don't you be sorry, Sweets, I'm sorry. I was moving in on you - occupational hazard. I'm a headhunter - that's what they pay me for," she added with a small, determined laugh. "But look, your hands will be fine once you… settle back in, and even if… Well, you wouldn't have to actually make the pieces any more, just design them. Oops, there I go again." She shook her head, the glossy deep red of it a match for the darkest of the autumn leaves. Like all her gestures, it was big enough to draw attention to itself.
"I had an offer a few months ago to just design," I said. "Gun motifs with my name attached to them. Some outfit wanted to sell them on cable TV. Outlaw chic was what they called it in their letter."
"I'm not even going to ask if you're kidding, I'm sure you're not. But you know that kind of sleaze isn't what I'm talking about. My GraceL pieces are the ones I always reach for - just like everybody who owns them. You've got a gift. Of course you need to keep using it."
"I'm not a sketch artist, okay? I'm a jeweler. Was. I was a jeweler who made things and then had some of them reproduced and marketed very profitably. However, a jeweler who can't hold a welding torch steady or set a stone right is no jeweler. So, that's it."
"But…" The sharp twang of rebuttal made my teeth grind. She might apologize but she never, ever gave up.
"Sheilah. No. "
She held up one hand, palm out. "Peace. You know me, the single-minded striver, universal care-taker." She gave a little heh heh of a laugh. "Prototypical only child of an alcoholic."
I pictured a pale, willowy blond - two drops of Mayflower blood in her veins and lots of attitude about it; drinking vodka, pretending it was ice water. She called herself, grandly for the run-down Washington Heights tenement where we all lived, Mrs. Carpenter-Donlan: the Carpenter to mark the blue blood she claimed, the Donlan to prove someone had married her once.
"Remember how she used to keep at me?" Sheilah asked with the rueful tone mention of her mother usually triggered, "my pan face, pug nose - and God how she hated my freckles."
"All of those are long gone, Gorgeous. Actually, I always thought your freckles were kind of cute. So, has Mrs. C-D softened with age in the last seven years?"
"Oh right! She keeps the booze in better check, at least around me because she's just a little scared I might cut her off otherwise but she's still the killer she always was and …" Her eyes flicked away from the road ahead to give me a stricken glance.
"What're you gonna do, censor every word you say in front of me? You know, up there we'd use the word about ourselves, some of us would. Maybe saying it is just easier than not saying it." I didn't add that others of us would not talk that talk ever, and anyone who dared it in their presence could end up with a cracked rib or burned arm as a penalty for bad judgment.
The set of Sheilah's face still telegraphed discomfort. And why shouldn't she be uneasy? Why would any civilian be at ease with one of us?
"Come on, finish what you started to say about your mother."
"Oh, same old same old: I don't tell her to go to hell. She lives like a rich lady, sips her Smirnoff in a fancy glass a block away from me in Murray Hill. I pick up the tab and buy her extras tied up with ribbons, and I still can't catch a break with her."
But she kept on with the minuet anyway, courting, wanting, hoping. Hell, she'd named her firm Carpenter-Donlan Associates, brooking no argument from shrink or friend.
In a fast turnabout, which took me by surprise she said, "Paul was such a bastard, such a beautiful bastard - that voice, like a TV evangelist. He could sell you salvation, or the Holland Tunnel ten minutes after you found out he didn't own the Brooklyn Bridge you just bought."
This was not new territory for us. She wanted to talk about Paul, about the rest of it, trawling maybe for some way to see into my head, to truly understand. "The voice was a lot better than any TV evangelist," I said evenly, "but please, I don't want to go there."
"You're going to have to go there sometime." I went often, not with any company though. She knew as much as she knew; lawyers and shrinks knew what I'd told them. Sheilah continued like a stream running where it always ran, "Grace, you could have pleaded innocent: self defense, temporary insanity. Better lawyers would've done it, I told you that. You'd applied for the restraining order…"
"It was not self-defense," I said for not the first or the twentieth time, "not the way the law means that. And if you think I was nuts you've got ample reason, but again, not legal reason." From a standing start, my heart began to pound like something needing to get out.
"The man stole from you, wrecked your business. I swear if anyone did that to me, I'd…"
"You don't know what you'd do," I said through gritted teeth. "Could… could we just not talk for awhile?"
We drove on, quiet except for the white sound of good tires on good pavement, until Sheilah turned on the radio to the lulling beat of some easy listening station. After some Joni and Beatles and Bonnie, I was the one who broke the silence. "Seeing any new men, lately?" It was an olive branch - better for us both than a lame explanation or another apology.
"Uh huh." She always was. "Briefly." That too. "Well, not that briefly, about five months. I didn't mention him when I came up because… I don't know, maybe I thought he'd be something and I didn't want to jinx it. Anyway, he's a sports agent: tall, cute, nice sense of humor - very high powered. But he'd have these headaches at the end of an evening, so I after a while I began to figure there might be someone else on his screen. And of course there was. Not some cute little actress or model, though. Guess what, my competition was the second-string goalie for the New York Rangers. Can you imagine?"
Her lips stretched into something halfway between smile and grimace. She was trying to entertain me and I could've kissed her for the effort. Then she grinned for real and the taut, ivory face relaxed. For a moment she resembled Sheilah Donlan of twenty-five years ago, before her features had been chiseled, laminated, peeled and implanted up to her standards, or her mother's - Sheilah Donlan, from a time when we were sure we'd grow up invincible because we were quick, talented and tough-willed.
"Love you," I said.
"You even love my big mouth?"
"Even that," I said. "Hey, who else would've schlepped up there almost every week for seven years to spend half an hour with a cranky felon in baggy green pants?"
"Can I say something? Promise you won't get mad."
I took a very deep breath. "Shoot," I said.
"A couple of your friends called me - Danton Redondo, Jan Simone. They want to see you, Gracie, but they don't want to... you know. Your new number's unlisted. I said… well, you'd call them."
There are two kinds of prisoners, the kind who live for visits and the kind who barely live through them. The first are mostly people with families, the prospect of overnights in a prison trailer with husband or kids their searchlight in the fog. I'd been the second kind: no family, only the fog. And thirty minutes of stilted small talk with someone who can go home only made the fog thicker. One by one, I'd turned them away or turned them off. Except for Sheilah who had just kept coming and, don't ask me why, but she would stride into that visitors' room her hair a flaming rebuttal to the gray-gray sterility and I'd be glad to see her. Most of the time I would be.
"I will," I said. "I just couldn't handle it when people would come up there. I was awful. I'm surprised Danton or Jan or anyone wants to bother with me. I'll call them - but maybe not right away. I need some time to kind of learn… how to be."
"Of course." Half a beat. "Just one more thing?"
"I may be thinged out, Sheil."
"The hair. It makes you look like Joan Baez playing Pocohontas's mother. I mean, a long, white braid? You're forty years old!"
My laugh was pure relief. "Pocohontas's mother was probably dead by the time she was forty. But I get your point."
"Good, because I've booked you with William at Garren tomorrow at two thirty. Garren, the hair place at Bendel's? He's a genius; he'll have you looking like you again. Even better now that you've lost - how many pounds?"
"I don't know how many pounds, but you have to know I'm not me again - and a haircut won't change that. I'll tell you what, I'll let the genius lop the braid off because I don't want to embarrass you in your office, but the gray hairs stay gray. I've earned them and I own them."
Excerpted from A FRACTURED TRUTH © Copyright 2003 by Caroline Slate. Reprinted with permission by Atria Books. All rights reserved.
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